FABLES & EARTH SPIRITS

The Green Man

It was something that came to her, that she could never quite explain. Perhaps it was a dream, perhaps some fay magic was on the loose and found her quite by accident. However it had transpired, there it was, the words were in her head, and though she tried to let them rest there, they were not content. They demanded, that night, by the light of the candle, to be spoken out loud.

She knew not what she did. Her breath grew heavy, her very mind seemed to fracture, mirror-like shards that splintered silver in the darkness, and then she was out in a new world, where the stars shone brighter and the earth smelt richer and all that was there was the most enormous, ancient oak tree, tangled branches filling the horizon.

‘By, and what do we have here?’ came a great, rumbling voice. She fell to her knees and gaped as the tree turned, with a groundshaking twist of root and limb, and formed the body of a most enormous oaken giant with a beaming, delighted expression upon his creviced face. ‘What creature are you, child, to chance upon an old man in his rest? Have you come to play?’

She shook her head, dumbfounded, and he chuckled, lowering his head, the branches that made his hair reaching down to tickle at her feet. She squirmed, and shuffled away from him, and he grew quite still, until she began to be afraid of him.

‘You are not of the fay at all,’ he said in wonderment, standing tall once more and casting out all light. ‘How then do you appear thus? Do you seek trouble?’

‘No!’ she managed. ‘I am only – only lost. Where is this place?’

‘You wander, and have found the fay world quite by accident? How extraordinary.’ He thought for a moment, and then reached out to her with a massive, gnarled hand. ‘Come, that I may keep you warm, and I shall tell you of our hidden world, for you are here now, and there are things you should know.’

She ventured forth and climbed into his hand, entranced by his otherness and too befuddled to refuse. And he told her countless tales of sprites and fairies, strange woodland creatures and even stranger water-dwellers, of adventure, and danger, and she thought she dreamed as she sat and listened to the gentle rumble of his voice, and the wind through his leaves, but she had never had a sweeter dream, not for all that she found in future times that it was no dream at all.